Graphical user interface builder

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NetBeans GUI builder Gui-builder.png
NetBeans GUI builder

A graphical user interface builder (or GUI builder), also known as GUI designer or sometimes RAD IDE, is a software development tool that simplifies the creation of GUIs by allowing the designer to arrange graphical control elements (often called widgets) using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor. Without a GUI builder, a GUI must be built by manually specifying each widget's parameters in the source code, with no visual feedback until the program is run. Such tools are usually called the term RAD IDE.

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User interfaces are commonly programmed using an event-driven architecture, so GUI builders also simplify creating event-driven code. This supporting code connects software widgets with the outgoing and incoming events that trigger the functions providing the application logic.

Some graphical user interface builders automatically generate all the source code for a graphical control element. Others, like Interface Builder or Glade Interface Designer, generate serialized object instances that are then loaded by the application.

List of GUI builders

C language based

C# based

C++ based

Objective-C / Swift based

Java based

HTML/JavaScript based

Object Pascal based

Tk framework based

Visual Basic based

Other tools

List of development environments

IDEs with GUI builders (RAD IDEs)

See also

Related Research Articles

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wxWidgets Widget toolkit

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Forms</span> Graphical user interface software library

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fox toolkit</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Blend</span> User interface design tool by Microsoft

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XRC, or XML Resource, or XML Based Resource System is a cross-platform XML-based user interface markup language used by wxWidgets. XRC allows graphical user interface elements, such as dialogs, menu bars and toolbars, to be stored as XML, which can be loaded into the application at run-time or translated into a target programming language and compiled.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lazarus (software)</span> Free cross-platform integrated development environment for Free Pascal

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The following tables list notable software packages that are nominal IDEs; standalone tools such as source-code editors and GUI builders are not included. These IDEs are listed in alphabetic order of the supported language.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mono (software)</span> Computer software project

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